Figures

554 entries. Click any to see everything it connects to.

Named figures from scripture, myth and legend who are not gods: prophets, apostles, patriarchs, heroes, saints and the personages of sacred narrative. Each entry records the tradition, the figure's role in the story and their principal associations. Whether a given figure is historical is a separate question from what the tradition says about them, and the entries do not conflate the two.

Facts

Overview

Entries in the Atlas: 554
Peoples and Traditions Covered: A cover heading. The traditions gathered under it each have their own vocabulary for these figures, navi in Hebrew, nabi and rasul in Arabic, apostolos in Christian Greek, rishi and guru in India, arhat and bodhisattva in Buddhism, Tirthankara in Jainism, and no one of those words is a translation of another. 1

Structure

Structure: Named figures of a tradition's sacred narrative who are not worshipped as gods, grouped by role, prophets, apostles, saints, sages, founders, kings, heroes and their adversaries among them. Where a tradition draws the line between a god and a revered non-divine figure differs, and in several it is internally disputed, so this category's boundary is not the same everywhere. 1

Sources

Encyclopedia of Religion Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), 2005, The classification of religious figures

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Figures of Sacred Narrative

This category holds the named figures of scripture, myth and legend who are not themselves gods: prophets, patriarchs and matriarchs, apostles and disciples, saints, sages, founders, kings, heroes and heroines, and their adversaries, demons, monsters and titans. They are the persons who act within a tradition's sacred story without being worshipped as divine.

The boundary with deity is drawn differently in different traditions and is sometimes internally disputed. A figure may be a revered but wholly human teacher in one community and an object of devotion approaching worship in another, and the atlas notes such cases rather than forcing a single classification.

Confession and history

For many of these figures the tradition's account and the historical record diverge, and the atlas keeps the two distinct. It reports what a tradition holds about its prophets, saints and heroes, their role in the narrative and their principal associations, while noting, where relevant, what historians can and cannot establish about a figure's existence or life.

The characters group by kind (prophets, apostles, saints, heroes, demons, valkyries, bodhisattvas and the rest), so a reader can move through the personnel of sacred story by type. Some are dual-modelled with a deity or historical-figure page and are kept complementary.